Fine-grained image analysis (FGIA) is a longstanding and fundamental problem in computer vision and pattern recognition, and underpins a diverse set of real-world applications. The task of FGIA targets analyzing visual objects from subordinate categories, e.g., species of birds or models of cars. The small inter-class and large intra-class variation inherent to fine-grained image analysis makes it a challenging problem. Capitalizing on advances in deep learning, in recent years we have witnessed remarkable progress in deep learning powered FGIA. In this paper we present a systematic survey of these advances, where we attempt to re-define and broaden the field of FGIA by consolidating two fundamental fine-grained research areas -- fine-grained image recognition and fine-grained image retrieval. In addition, we also review other key issues of FGIA, such as publicly available benchmark datasets and related domain-specific applications. We conclude by highlighting several research directions and open problems which need further exploration from the community.
@article{arxiv.2111.06119,
title = {Fine-Grained Image Analysis with Deep Learning: A Survey},
author = {Xiu-Shen Wei and Yi-Zhe Song and Oisin Mac Aodha and Jianxin Wu and Yuxin Peng and Jinhui Tang and Jian Yang and Serge Belongie},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.06119},
year = {2021}
}